PoliWeb project (PEPS'14)

Geraldine CastelCEMRA, Université Stendhal, France

Genoveva Vargas-SolarCNRS, LIG-LAFMIA, France

Towards a cloud infrastructure for collecting, storing and analyzing data flows produced by politicians

Javier Espinosa LAFMIA, UMI CNRS Mexicojavier.espinosa@imag.fr

Journée Big Humanities, 8 December 2014, Université Stendhal

Have you been tweeting about the elections?

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Doing politics in the era of big data 2008 was called the “social media election” with 1.8 million

tweets sent on election day.

Barack Obama’s appearance at the Democratic National Convention caused 4 million tweets total during his 39 minute speech (52,000 tweets / minute).

9/10 Senators and Representatives have their own Twitter accounts.

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2012 in France

Sources: blogs.salesforce.com, web.archive.org

UMP # of times crawled

How is this online political activity affecting the elections ?

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Social networks and IT

in politics

Volume of data big data

Analytics

Juridical issues

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Objective

Implications Collect data from social networks, websites and politicians' blog Curate and store these data Define a continuous comparison process that can evolve during time

and as new information is integrated in the database

" Compare the impact of the use of communication tools in the campaign strategies of the Europeans elections in France and UK"

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Challenges

Time and ownership Data of interest is determined by the campaign period (EU elections)

which is short Access, exploitation and storage of data can be limited or partially limited

according to juridical laws in both countries

Data curation and storage Fill-in missing information and unbalanced content retrieved about entities

that must be compared Organization according to political and geographical organization

Provenance and pertinence

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Expected Results

Integrated historical and distributed database of documents, photos, text and social networks posts Data provenance, freshness Structure Respecting privacy and data ownership, owner anonymity

Analysis platform for querying the database with respect to different criteria: Geographic and temporal parameters Statistics Political organization and tendencies

Compare strategies and conditions of the elections in UK and France

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Roadmap

Doing politics in the era of Big Data

Analyzing political campaign strategies in Europe Data collection and curation Comparing for understanding strategies: UK vs. France

Conclusions and perspectives

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Data Collection and Curation

Political Parties

Pull data

Scrap Web

Pushed data

[Time interval]

Frequency

Candidates

Constituencies

Juridical issues

Geographic provenance

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Comparison and Analysis Requirements ( i ) Query criteria

Date, candidate, party, document type, key words (frequent words/term clouds)

Data provenance Party, webmaster, candidate, campaign staff

Generate an inventory geo-localized and grouped by parties and militants Content types: video, text, image, document Links to other content and tools: donations on line, other campaign actions,

Facebook pages and support committees, agenda

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Comparison and Analysis Requirements ( ii ) Compare content from sites, personal blogs and pages, parties sites

Common and different elements: content and structure (communication strategies)

Count and compare Facebook posts, comments, likes and shares

Propose visualization Comparison of tools, candidates, parties, countries For example:

Which candidate is the most visible within the same party, among parties?

Compare data stemming from different sources (e.g. preferences of tools, content type) of users and parties

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Roadmap

Doing politics in the era of Big Data

Analyzing political campaign strategies in Europe Data collection and curation Comparing for understanding strategies: UK vs. France

Conclusions and perspectives

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Current Work

Propose a juridical profile of content and tools directly and transitively used by candidates and parties Ownership, right of use, storage, dissemination Consider different legislations according to the country

Implement a data collection process guided by juridical profile, temporal issues related to the type of elections analyzed

Propose a data curation process, guided by QoS aspects: Juridical, temporal, provenance, reputation, geography and characteristics of

the official organization of the process

Technology is changing the way elections are run.In which extent and how?

We need to develop analysis tools in a multidisciplinary context to provide a comprehensive picture

? Geraldine CastelCEMRA, Université Stendhal, France

Genoveva Vargas-SolarCNRS, LIG-LAFMIA, FranceJavier Espinosa

LAFMIA, UMI 3175 CNRS Mexicojavier.espinosa@imag.fr